JAMES LILEKS’ WEDNESDAY REVIEW OF MODERN THOUGHT:

Almost 60% of the respondents approved of lockdowns and restrictions. Something had taken hold: Perma-concern. I don’t know what it’ll take to change it, aside from everyone getting it. I was surprised when the news about anti-viral treatments in pill form (there are four, I think, of varying efficacy) didn’t seem to make a dent in the mindset of the Perma-concerned.

The only comparable mindset: Cold War nuclear dread. Fear of Climate doesn’t match, because it’s indistinct and slow and elsewhere. Nuclear dread was immediate and personal. Same here.

The difference is that no one wanted to live in constant worry over Soviet nukes. Everyone was happy when the USSR fell, except for the hectoring misanthropic collectivists who used their participation in a mass movement and hatred of their own society as a cover for their own unhappiness.

I don’t know, maybe some parallels apply.

Read the whole thing.

Related: Freddie deBoer on Covid as Liberal 9/11.

THE TRUCKERS FIGHTING DYSTOPIA:

The general tendency is toward disciplining, if not erasing, the human element—especially where the human element might inconveniently resist the world our elites wish to bring into being. Lockdowns and business restrictions, for example, just happened to target small biz, but not the Walmarts and Amazons of the world. Workers in retail, service and similar industries, meanwhile, are required to quite literally efface themselves and to stand partitioned off from the people they serve. Trucking ideally would be totally automated, but for now, truckers must be made to submit to the vaccine mandate.

Well, that last group isn’t having it. In Canada, truckers have been making themselves seen and loudly heard, rallying a mass convoy to Ottawa that has apparently sent Prime Minister Justin Trudeau into seclusion (he claims he has contracted Covid). Similar convoys are rolling into power centers in Europe, as well. This is as organic and peaceful and compelling as working-class causes get, yet as the Marxist writer Edwin Aponte notes at the Bellows, the professional and media left is trying its best to ignore the movement or frame it as “fascist” and “racist.”

These false and stupid charges ring increasingly hollow, especially as more people discern what’s really at stake in the battles of the Covid and post-Covid eras: namely, defending the human element—man as a rational, political animal—that global elites would seek to mask, mandate, automate, and social-distance out of existence.

Honk for the freedom-truckers.

Click over to the Small Dead Animals blog for more on the Canadian truckers, including this endorsement:

OLD AND BUSTED: Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.

—The London Independent, March 20th, 2000.

The New Hotness? Climate change may be fueling increase in major Northeast snowstorms.

—The Washington Post, today.

AS HEADS IS TAILS: The hippies have become the cops.

You either die a rebel or live long enough to see yourself turn into a snowflake. The generation of free love and free expression have gradually transformed into the baton-wielders.

I’m referring to Neil Young’s demand that Spotify either pull his entire catalog or do away with Joe Rogan’s podcast. Spotify reportedly paid $100 million to acquire Rogan’s podcast in 2020. You’d imagine their contract includes legal bulwarks against such demands. Young is reportedly upset with Covid “misinformation” (the media’s new favorite vague term) and is no longer willing to abide by a streaming service that plays host to Rogan.

It took Spotify about three seconds to make their decision: Neil Young is no longer on their platform. Soon after, Joni Mitchell issued the same demand, as did some fella who played in a Bruce Springsteen cover band or something. Thus far, no artist on Spotify under the age of seventy has rallied against the streaming service.

Take a bow, flower children: you’ve officially become the authoritarians you always warned us about. Just as in politics, the hippies have decided they are not leaving our culture without a feeble hypocritical fight.

* * * * * * * *

These older musicians are demanding censorship and fealty to the Man. That should be Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Howard Stern’s legacy from here on out.

Speaking of fealty to The Man: White House Advocates for Big Tech to Censor Health Experts They Disagree With.

Related: These Two Tech Platforms Are Standing Up to Twitter Mobs and Defending Free Expression.

WHOOPI DOUBLES DOWN ON HOLOCAUST REMARKS — DESPITE APOLOGY: ‘THEY HAD ISSUES WITH ETHNICITY, NOT WITH RACE.’

“I feel, being black, when we talk about race it’s a very different thing to me,” Goldberg told Colbert. “So I said I thought the Holocaust wasn’t about race. And it made people very angry. I’m getting a lot of mail from folks and a lot of anger. But I thought it was a salient discussion because as a black person I think of race as being something that I can see.”

“People were very angry, and said no, we are a race. And I understand. I felt differently. I respect everything everyone is saying to me. I don’t want to fake apologize,” she added. “I am very upset that people misunderstood what I was saying. And because of it they are saying I am anti-Semitic, and denying the Holocaust, and all these other things that would never occur to me to do.

“Have you come to understand that the Nazis saw it as race?” Colbert asked. “Asking the Nazis, they would say, ‘Yes, it’s a racial issue.’”

“This is what’s interesting to me because the Nazis lied. It wasn’t,” Goldberg said, and then attempted to split hairs by suggesting it was an ethnic issue rather than a racial one. “They — they had issues with ethnicity, not with race, because most of the Nazis were white people and most of the people they were attacking were white people. So to me, I’m thinking, how can you say it’s about race if you are fighting each other?”

“So it all really began because I said how will children — how will we explain to children what happened in Nazi Germany?” Goldberg continued. “This wasn’t — I said — this wasn’t racial. This was about white on white. And everybody said no, no, no, it was racial. And so that’s what this all came from.”

“So once again, don’t write me any more, I know how you feel. Okay, I already know, I get it,” Goldberg concluded. “And, uh, I’m going to take your word for it. And never bring it up again.”

Related: More Whoopi: Who knew the Nazis saw Jews as a race? Ed Morrissey writes:

And no, the Nazis didn’t have to “delve deeply” to figure out who was Jewish. Nazis didn’t beam down from a spaceship in 1933, after all. They had lived among Jews all their lives, and knew where they worshiped, lived, and acted as communities throughout Germany. They used the power of government to find them, track them down, and force them to label themselves. Those yellow stars weren’t so much used to allow Nazis to find the Jews, but to warn other Germans from interacting with them. A handful of Jews in Germany avoided identification, but the Nazis knew enough about almost all of them to classify them by their ancestry — at least until Wannsee, when the Nazis finally dispensed with the pretense and kicked off their industrial extermination program.

The problem with race is that race is entirely a construct. There are no meaningful physical differences between humans of different ethnicities. Every significant difference postulated can be traced to culture, economics, or class. We have spent decades trying to undo the damage of centuries of belief in meaningful racial distinctions here in the US, so much so that we have lost sight of the fact that it’s all in our heads. The point of the Nazis isn’t that they got race wrong with the Jews, but that racism is an entirely idiotic practice based on a lie in itself. Now we get these foolish conversations in which we’re parsing out race as a privilege in terms of discussion, again, which is remarkably similar to the same kind of thinking that led us here in the first place.

Finally, a modest proposal from Jeff Dunetz: “Whoopi Goldberg is a stage name. Her birth name is Caryn Elaine Johnson – in other words, despite using the stage name Goldberg she isn’t, nor has she ever been Jewish. Using that stage name, some people blame her stupidity on the Jews. And because of her stage name, every time she says something idiotic, the Jews get blamed. In the interest of tolerance and preventing Anti-Semitism, I believe that Ms. Goldberg should remove the cultural appropriation and change her stage name.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Whoopi’s politics make a lot more sense when you realize that her real name is a variation of “Karen.”

XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT!

Earlier: Welcome to the PMRC, Neil Young.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Shot: The depopulation timebomb facing the West is about to explode.

Elon Musk’s quest to make humanity a multi-planet species has a hitch.

The SpaceX boss hopes to have people landing on Mars within five years as part of his vision for a “futuristic Noah’s ark”. But Musk fears his plan to colonise the Red Planet will fail to take off if Earth cannot even sustain its own population.

“We should be much more worried about population collapse,” Musk warned in a series of tweets last week, calling the UN’s more sanguine projections “utter nonsense”.

“If there aren’t enough people for Earth, then there definitely won’t be enough for Mars.”

Once a problem far in the future, the population crisis is arriving earlier than expected after the Covid baby bust. Populations in countries including Japan are already in decline, while those in the likes of Spain, South Korea and China are set to halve by 2100.

But for some, including Sir David Attenborough, the big population bust should not be feared. The nature broadcaster has called for the global population to be brought under control in order to maintain living standards, calling humanity a “plague on Earth”.

—The London Telegraph, January 22^nd. Incidentally, it’s nice of Attenborough to be honest about what he thinks about his viewers.

Chaser: Can the world cope with billions more people?

—The London Telegraph, April 14^th, 2009.

I look forward to numerous geriatric rock stars cancelling Paul Ehrlich for spreading false information.

SEX OFFENDER, 26, GETS JUVENILE SENTENCE THANKS TO SOROS-BACKED D.A. GEORGE GASCÓN:

26-year-old convicted sex offender Hannah Tubbs will serve two years in a juvenile facility, and will not have to register as a sex offender, thanks to George Soros-backed L.A. District Attorney George Gascón’s decision not to prosecute in adult court.

Tubbs, a transgender female, admitted choking and sexually assaulting a 10-year-old in a bathroom stall at a restaurant in 2014, a crime that shocked L.A. at the time and was not solved until DNA evidence turned up in Tubbs’s later criminal trials.

The transgender male-to-female Tubbs was linked to the crime in 2019. As Breitbart News reported last month, Gascón triggered outrage by prosecuting Tubbs as a juvenile because the crime occurred just before Tubbs’s 18th birthday.

Gascón explained that he was honoring a campaign promise not to prosecute juveniles as adults. He won in 2020 with the aid of millions of dollars from Soros, and endorsements from Democrats up and down the state, including L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti, who switched his loyalty from incumbent D.A. Jackie Lacey, the first black woman to serve in the D.A. position.

As Tom Cotton wrote in December: Recall, Remove & Replace Every Last Soros Prosecutor.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Hispanic Students Were Forced To Learn Critical Race Theory. They Hated It.

DISPATCHES FROM THE MEMORY HOLE: COVID Affects Your Memory.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which had previously argued against coercive public health measures, was nowhere to be found. The American left, with which I’d always identified because of its claims to uphold workers’ rights and principles of bodily autonomy, now explicitly advocated for forced quarantines of healthy people and for policies that dramatically increased the wealth of the world’s richest at the expense of the working class. After spending four years checking every perceived authoritarian impulse from Donald Trump, the media suddenly called for strict enforcement of government decrees, denounced the noncompliant, punished dissenters, and advocated for Big Tech clampdowns on speech. On Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, users were censored and banned for expressing viewpoints that contradicted the ever-changing messaging from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control. The simple act of sharing official data on the COVID survival rate among different age groups was considered an act of harm that could lead to thousands if not millions of deaths.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR: Joy Behar Is ‘Disappointed’ Because More People Should Have Cut Spotify Over Joe Rogan.

Joy Behar expressed her frustrations during Monday’s broadcast of “The View” on ABC, complaining that not enough high-profile musicians or podcasters had removed their own work from Spotify over the platform’s failure to dump podcast juggernaut Joe Rogan.

Behar and her cohosts — Whoopi Goldberg, Sara Haines, Sunny Hostin, and Ana Navarro — responded to the news that Joni Mitchell had joined musician Neil Young in pulling her music from Spotify over claims that Rogan was promoting “COVID misinformation,” and Behar said that she would have liked to see more artists follow suit.

If deplatforming talk shows on Spotify over misinformation is something Behar desires, let’s make that happen: Forget Joe Rogan … how can Spotify continue to host The View’s ‘dangerous antisemitism’?

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Whoopi Goldberg: The Holocaust wasn’t about race because it involved two groups of white people.

I’ve watched this three times and have no idea what she’s getting at.

But I bet the Nazis would be surprised to hear that the Jews whom they tried to exterminate were part of the same racial group as the Nazis themselves.

The panel was discussing the decision made by one Tennessee school district to remove Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” from the eighth-grade curriculum due to, of all things, language and nudity. Evidently a story about people (represented in the novel by mice) being sent to Auschwitz wasn’t too mature for 13-year-olds to handle but a drawing of a nude anthropomorphic mouse crossed the line.

A Twitter pal watched this and asked, “Uh, is she really ‘all lives mattering’ the Holocaust?”

* * * * * * * *

Whatever she meant, I’m excited to see how Whoopi cleans this up on tomorrow’s show. Oh, and Behar is right about a burst in sales for “Maus” amid the coverage of what happened in Tennessee. The two volumes currently occupy the top three spots on Amazon’s list of bestselling comics and graphic novels. Nothing gooses interest in a book like some authority deeming it unfit.

Exit quotation from Steve Krakauer: “If Joe Rogan said ‘The Holocaust isn’t about race’ and that ‘these are two white groups of people,’ we’d never stop hearing about it from the Acela Media’s loudest anti-speech activists…”

Flashback: Whoopi Goldberg Entertains Moon Landing Conspiracy Theories.

Not surprisingly, as of the time of this post, there’s no reference to Goldberg’s meltdown on the CBS and NBC news websites, let alone ABC News itself, which co-produces the View, as the guild protects its own. (See also: Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings defending Dan Rather.)

THE CANADIAN CONVOY HAS STOLEN THE HEARTS OF THE PEOPLE AND THE MEDIA IS NOT TAKING IT WELL:

The media cannot stand the fact that the narrative about the Canadian trucker convoy protest has gotten away from them and you can see how they feel about it by taking a look at how MSNBC is reacting.

The trucker convoy protest has been making its way through Canada’s capital city of Ottawa and has become the largest in history spanning an astounding 45 miles. At the center of the protest is the message that Canadians are rejecting the government vaccine, mask, and lockdown mandates, and the desire to be treated as free westerners, not subjects of a single man and his leftist whims. Canadians of all stripes showed up to show their support for the convoy over the weekend en masse.

The media was content to never speak of the convoy — unless it was to demonize it — as it was proof-positive that the people are not with them, the politicians they serve, or the ideology they support, despite all their claims to the contrary. The issue was that this gathering over the weekend around the truckers was so large that they had to acknowledge it.

Acknowledge it they did, but you could tell they weren’t happy about it, and consistently attempted to make them out to be the villains.

* * * * * * * *

“This. Is. A. Cult,” Scarborough finished.

A cult you say?

● ‘Cuomosexuals’ lament fall of groping gov: Cuomo was my shamelessly sexy God.

● ‘JUST STOP!’ ABC News reminds everybody that Andrew Cuomo merch is ‘trending all over Etsy.’

● A company is turning Dr. Anthony Fauci and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi into action figures.

● Texas company salutes Dr. Anthony Fauci with kitschy prayer candle.

● Review: Hot Cup of Joe, The Sexy Biden Coloring Book.

● NPR: Dozens of public health and disease experts have signed an open letter in support of the nationwide anti-racism protests. “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19,” they wrote.

Earlier: Finally a Real Working-Class Revolt Against the Man, and the Left Hates It.

Exit quote: “I think it’s hilarious that the socialists are furious about the workers of the world uniting.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Related:

(Bumped).

KEEP ON GRIFTING IN THE FREE WORLD: Welcome to the PMRC, Neil Young.

If you’re Generation X or older, you might be getting flashbacks over this whole “Neil Young vs. Joe Rogan & Spotify” contretemps. On one side, we’ve got a popular public figure who’s expressing his thoughts and opinions, just as America’s Founding Fathers told us we get to do. On the other side, we’ve got a bunch of miserable old fuddy-duddies who want to shut down free speech because they believe it hurts people.

In other words, Neil Young just revived the PMRC.

If you don’t know what the PMRC was and you’re too lazy to google it, here’s the short version:

Back in the ‘80s, a senator’s wife named Tipper Gore got sick of her kids listening to music she didn’t like, so she started an organization called the Parents Music Resource Center. The PMRC compiled a list of songs they found unacceptable, including “Darling Nikki” by Prince, “We’re Not Gonna Take It” by Twisted Sister, and “She Bop” by Cyndi Lauper. Then Tipper used her political connections to convince the Senate to hold hearings about this supposedly dangerous music.

In other words, a lot of Americans decided they liked what popular entertainers were saying, and a handful of busybodies tried to put a stop to it. “If we don’t want to listen to it, nobody should get to listen to it. We need to protect the helpless unwashed masses from themselves!”

Sound familiar?

It’s Jim Treacher, so read the whole thing.

SQUAD GOALS: Here’s How Much AOC and the ‘Squad’ Would Personally Benefit From Student Debt ‘Cancellation.’

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH PIERS MORGAN IS A VOICE OF SANITY: Give me Joe Rogan over cancel culture vultures like Harry and Meghan anytime.

JOE ROGAN BREAKS SILENCE ON THE LEFT’S ATTEMPT TO GET HIM REMOVED FROM SPOTIFY:

Starting with musician Neil Young, liberals and progressives have intensified their calls for Rogan to be censored for what they say have been “misinformation” from Rogan’s podcast about COVID-19, specifically his interviews with Dr. Peter McCullough, a cardiologist, and Dr. Robert Malone, an infectious disease specialist and inventor of the mRNA vaccine.

“I think there’s a lot of people who have a distorted perception of what I do, maybe based on soundbites or based on headlines of articles that are disparaging. The podcast has been accused of spreading ‘dangerous misinformation…both [McCullough and Malone] are very highly credentialed, very intelligent, very accomplished people and they have an opinion that’s different from the mainstream narrative. I wanted to hear what their opinion is. I had them on,” Rogan said in his video statement…Rogan said he does not know if either McCullough or Malone are right in their opinions but that’s the point of the podcast, to have a real conversation.

Neil Young’s intentions now seem like transparently obvious grift:

● Amazon and Apple Music flaunt support for Neil Young with special deals and playlists after legendary artist breaks from Spotify in ultimatum over Joe Rogan podcast.

● Neil Young’s Radio Channel on SiriusXM Is Revived After Spotify Removal.

Incidentally, it’s a good thing social media wasn’t around in the 1970s, considering this passage from Kenneth Tynan’s 1978 profile of Johnny Carson in the New Yorker:

On the wall behind [longtime producer Freddie] de Cordova’s desk hangs a chart showing the lineup of guests for weeks, and even months, ahead. Perennial absentees, long sought, never snared, include Elton John and Robert Redford. When de Cordova is asked why the list is so sparsely dotted with people of much intellectual firepower, he reacts with bewilderment: “That just isn’t true. We’ve had some of the finest minds I know—Carl Sagan, Paul Ehrlich, Margaret Mead, Gore Vidal, Shana Alexander, Madalyn Murray O’Hair.” This odd aggregation of names sprang from the lips of many other “Tonight Show” employees to whom I put that question, almost as if they were contractually bound to commit it to memory.

If the left’s goal is to get talk show hosts sacked because of misinformation spewn by their guests, Paul Ehrlich and Margaret Mead’s appearances alone would have been firing offenses.

THE GRIFTERS: Biden’s Pledge To Appoint Black Woman To SCOTUS Was Quid Pro Quo For James Clyburn’s Endorsement. A promise Biden now portrays as high-minded in fact was a trade for an endorsement.

DISPATCHES FROM THE FRENCH LAUNDRY: Maskless Gov. Newsom spotted at 49ers-Rams game despite mandate.

INGLEWOOD, Calif. — Despite a statewide mandate for universal indoor masking, photos captured Governor Gavin Newsom and other officials not wearing masks while indoors at SoFi Stadium on Sunday.

The governor was attending the NFC Championship game where the San Francisco 49ers lost to the Los Angeles Rams.

At one point during the game, Magic Johnson posed for a photo with Governor Newsom. Neither men wore masks.

Magic Johnson posted a separate photo on social media posing with San Francisco Mayor London Breed and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. Again, none of them wore masks.

It’s curious to see California’s celebrities and Magic Johnson flouting SoFi Stadium’s COVID-19 Safety Protocols with no repercussions:

Effective December 15th, 2021: prior to entering SoFi Stadium, guests 5 years and older must provide proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test result. For guests providing proof of a negative test, it is required that negative results from a PCR test are within a 48 hour period prior to the event and negative results from an Antigen test are within 24 hours of the event, per L.A. County Health orders. Guests 18 years and older must also provide a photo ID with a matching name.

I hope everyone attending the Super Bowl in skyboxes in two weeks remembers they’re going to be seen by a worldwide audience flaunting the stadium’s mask rules, knowing full well that similar privileges do not apply to Outer Party members and their children: LA schools to require students to wear non-cloth face masks.

HMMM: BECERRA FIRST CABINET SECRETARY UNDER THE BUS?

If the latter was the real concern, then the White House would fire Rochelle Walensky and push Anthony Fauci into retirement. Becerra is apparently more expendable, although it’s not clear why. Becerra doesn’t have any significant background in health care, but that was the case when Biden picked him for this job, too.

That fact would make a Becerra dismissal for scapegoating a bit … complicated. Biden insisted on putting Becerra into that slot mainly to conduct lawfare against the pro-life movement through ObamaCare edicts, a move that generated plenty of criticism at the time. In the middle of a pandemic, people expected a true public-health expert to get chosen to run the nation’s COVID-19 response, not a former attorney general with a radical resumé. Becerra barely survived his confirmation vote at the time, and has done nothing to distinguish himself since. As early as last May, rumors began swirling about Becerra’s standing in the Biden administration.

However, Biden made the choice to appoint an unqualified political hack to run Health and Human Services. Dumping him now would be tantamount to a double confession: first that the pandemic response s been bungled, and second that Biden should never have appointed Becerra in the first place. Neither of those sound like a great way to distance Biden from the pandemic stench, even if he might get an opportunity to reset the response, maybe, if the White House allows a new HHS Secretary to run the policy him/herself.

Good to see the Biden camp finally beginning to agree with Rand Paul. Exit quote: “Are you a medical doctor?”

GLENN GREENWALD: The Pressure Campaign on Spotify to Remove Joe Rogan Reveals the Religion of Liberals: Censorship.

Given the climate prevailing in the American liberal faction, this authoritarianism is anything but surprising. For those who convince themselves that they are not battling mere political opponents with a different ideology but a fascist movement led by a Hitler-like figure bent on imposing totalitarianism — a core, defining belief of modern-day Democratic Party politics — it is virtually inevitable that they will embrace authoritarianism. When a political movement is subsumed by fear — the Orange Hitler will put you in camps and end democracy if he wins again* — then it is not only expected but even rational to embrace authoritarian tactics including censorship to stave off this existential threat. Fear always breeds authoritarianism, which is why manipulating and stimulating that human instinct is the favorite tactic of political demagogues.

And when it comes to authoritarian tactics, censorship has become the liberals’ North Star. Every week brings news of a newly banished heretic. Liberals cheered the news last week that Google’s YouTube permanently banned the extremely popular video channel of conservative commentator Dan Bongino. His permanent ban was imposed for the crime of announcing that, moving forward, he would post all of his videos exclusively on the free speech video platform Rumble after he received a seven-day suspension from Google’s overlords for spreading supposed COVID “disinformation.” What was Bongino’s prohibited view that prompted that suspension? He claimed cloth masks do not work to stop the spread of COVID, a view shared by numerous experts and, at least in part, by the CDC. When Bongino disobeyed the seven-day suspension by using an alternative YouTube channel to announce his move to Rumble, liberals cheered Google’s permanent ban because the only thing liberals hate more than platforms that allow diverse views are people failing to obey rules imposed by corporate authorities.

It is not hyperbole to observe that there is now a concerted war on any platforms devoted to free discourse and which refuse to capitulate to the demands of Democratic politicians and liberal activists to censor. The spear of the attack are corporate media outlets, who demonize and try to render radioactive any platforms that allow free speech to flourish. When Rumble announced that a group of free speech advocates — including myself, former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, comedian Bridget Phetasy, former Sanders campaign videographer Matt Orfalea and journalist Zaid Jilani — would produce video content for Rumble, The Washington Post immediately published a hit piece, relying exclusively on a Google-and-Facebook-aligned so-called “disinformation expert” to malign Rumble as “one of the main platforms for conspiracy communities and far-right communities in the U.S. and around the world” and a place “where conspiracies thrive,” all caused by Rumble’s “allowing such videos to remain on the site unmoderated.” (The narrative about Rumble is particular bizarre since its Canadian founder and still-CEO, Chris Pavlovski created Rumble in 2013 with apolitical goals — to allow small content creators abandoned by YouTube to monetize their content — and is very far from an adherent to right-wing ideology).

Flashback: Beyond the Culture of Repudiation. “In all of his political writings, [the late Roger Scruton] takes on the Left for scorning existing norms and customs, and for promoting a ‘culture of repudiation.’ The Left is ‘negative.’ It dismisses ‘every aspect of our cultural capital’ with the language of brutal invective: accusing every defender of human nature and sound tradition of ‘racism,’ ‘xenophobia,’ ‘homophobia,’ and ‘sexism.’ Like 1984’s ‘two minutes of hate,’ this language tears down, intimidates, and can never build anything humane or constructive—it is nihilistic to the core. At the same time, Scruton wants to reach out to reasonable liberals who eschew ideology and who still believe in civility and the promise of national belonging. His conservatism can discern the truth in liberalism (another Aristotelian trait) while the partisans of repudiation see half the human race as enemies.”

* I’m so old I can remember when Naomi Wolf at the Huffington Post screamed in September of 2008 that it would be John McCain and Sarah “Evita” Palin who would usher in “the Rovian Police State:”

Please understand what you are looking at when you look at Sarah “Evita” Palin. You are looking at the designated muse of the coming American police state.

You have to understand how things work in a closing society in order to understand “Palin Power.” A gang or cabal seizes power, usually with an affable, weak figurehead at the fore. Then they will hold elections — but they will make sure that the election will be corrupted and that the next affable, weak figurehead is entirely in their control.

Um, thanks for letting us “understand” how things work, Naomi. And from here, she regales us with a strong dose of melodrama:

I realized early on with horror what I was seeing in Governor Palin: the continuation of the Rove-Cheney cabal, but this time without restraints. I heard her echo Bush 2000 soundbites (“the heart of America is on display”) and realized Bush’s speechwriters were writing her — not McCain’s — speeches. I heard her tell George Bush’s lies — not McCain’s — to the American people, linking 9/11 to Iraq. I heard her make fun of Barack Obama for wanting to prevent the torture of prisoners — this is Rove-Cheney’s enthusiastic S and M, not McCain’s, who, though he shamefully colluded in the 2006 Military Tribunals Act, is also a former prisoner of war and wrote an eloquent Newsweek piece in 2005 opposing torture. I saw that she was even styled by the same skillful stylist (neutral lipstick, matte makeup, dark colors) who turned Katharine Harris from a mall rat into a stateswoman and who styles all the women in the Bush orbit –but who does not bother to style Cindy McCain.

Wolf continues to wave her magic butterfly net with yet more inadvertently comedic gems:

...She uses mafia tactics against critics, like the police commissioner who was railroaded for opposing handguns in Alaskan battered women’s shelters — Rove’s style, not McCain’s…

…Reports confirmed my suspicions: Palin, not McCain, is the FrankenBarbie of the Rove-Cheney cabal…

…I believe the Rove-Cheney cabal is using Sarah Palin as a stalking horse, an Evita figure, to put a popular, populist face on the coming police state and be the talk show hostess for the end of elections as we know them. If McCain-Palin get in, this will be the last true American election. She will be working for Halliburton, KBR, Rove and Cheney into the foreseeable future…

Just do a CTL-F and swap out the names, and you’ll have an excellent preview of how the left viewed former President Trump. The Evita references are particularly nostalgic, considering AOC’s embrace of Peron’s legacy in 2019:

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES WASN’T A HOW-TO GUIDE FOR GOOD GOVERNMENT: Seattle Officials Drafted Legislation to Hand Over Police Building to BLM Rioters in June 2020.

Former Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan’s administration drafted legislation in June 2020 that would have transferred the police department’s East Precinct building to a Black Lives Matter organization, the Seattle Times reported on Sunday.

The legislation was drafted by the Department of Finance and Administrative Services around the same time that protesters calling to defund the police converged on the East Precinct in the wake of riots over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

On June 8, 2020, FAS director Calvin Goings emailed three memos and a draft resolution to transfer the East Precinct building to the non-profit Black Lives Matter Seattle–King County. That same day, Seattle police officers boarded up the windows of the East Precinct building and evacuated the premises.

Following the evacuation, activists set up an “autonomous zone” in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, which was cleared by police on July 1 following a series of shootings in the area. Then-police chief Carmen Best slammed the decision to evacuate the building, saying it prevented the department from responding to 911 calls in the vicinity.

Here’s an artist’s recreation of how the proposed transfer of power would have taken place:

THE DOCTOR IS NOW OPERATING ON A HIGHER PLANE: Howard Hesseman, Prolific Character Actor and Star of ‘WKRP in Cincinnati,’ Dies at 81.

HIPPIES FOR CENSORSHIP:

Does Rogan give space to some crackers views about the Covid vaccines? Yep. So what? And I ask that as someone who is very pro-vaccination. If you dislike what Rogan says, then set up your own podcast to counter him. How about doing that, Neil Young? You could be pro-science for a change. Here’s the thing about Rogan: his success is the least mysterious thing in the 21st-century media landscape. It is the colonisation of the mainstream media by woke elites who all think in the exact same way, and who will hound you off their turf if you don’t, that created the conditions in which a questioning, dissenting pod like Rogan’s could become a global phenomenon. It is the mainstream media’s failures that birthed the success of Rogan and others; it is the stifling of free, frank, deep discussion in the old media that created the space for new media to emerge and flourish. The old hippy Neil Young would have understood that; the newly square Neil Young clearly doesn’t.

Meanwhile, in great moments in mutually assured cancellation: AWKWARD: Lefties CHEERING Neil Young for trying to cancel Joe Rogan TRIP spectacularly over his homophobic past.

Since the Washington Post believes that Eric Clapton should still be accountable for a drunken racist outburst in 1976, shouldn’t the same rules apply to Young?

Finally, also joining the cancel-culture brigade is Joni Mitchell — and Nils Lofrgen(?!): Springsteen guitarist Nils Lofgren latest to pull music off Spotify in protest.

Lofgren wasn’t exactly a best-selling solo artist in the 1970s, which is both why he joined Springsteen’s band after “Miami” Steve Van Zandt left temporarily in the mid-1980s, and why Lofgren is eager to get an extra 15 minutes of fame in 2022 by pulling his solo tunes from Spotify. But why is he defending someone who has made such homophobic statements? Why is he anti-free speech and pro-big government? Particularly when Springsteen himself has said that “blind faith in your leaders, or in anything, will get you killed:”

WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY: Gloria Steinem: Saving Babies From Abortion is “Patriarchy,” Pro-Life People are Like Hitler.

This just in: Hitler was not exactly a pro-life dictator.